# 💼 Business models

Ahh yes, business. The reason we all get to wear silly little clothes and get up early every day. A big part of starting my own company (TBD) was being able to create an environment that matched the way I believe a business should be run. One that fits the way I want to live my life in general. This is a surprisingly huge problem area that I don't think enough founders spend time to think about before building their start up. Everyone wants to shoot for the moon, make a billion dollars, but forget they have to live a life during all of that as well.

# Bootstrapping

My favorite Minneapolis resident, Rob Walling, is the forefather of bootstrapping companies. Building something in a slow, consistent, measurable way, investing your profits back into the company. This is in opposition to the venture model, which burns cash, and lives, in the hope to someday make a profitable business. Man I'd love to be filthy rich, but honestly I have a short attention span and building a billion dollar company seems like it'd get boring after awhile. Hiring, politics, hiring, politics, board meetings, etc...

Bootstrapping has and still is a leading contender for how I want to run a company, in the back of my mind venture is still a thought (hi VCs!), and taking capital isn't a bad thing. However, the endless pursuit of funding rounds, layoffs, and bullshit isn't really in my arena.

# Get to the point

I say all this to try and frame the context for a lot of my writing. You might think: "dude just get funding and give it a shot". Meh? I'll have to take a dive eventually, but jumping uneducated into a problem with other people's money is a path for someone else.

This means that as I'm evaluating ideas and disqualifying potential opportunities, the type of business I'd have to build to pursue those ideas is a large part of the process. Is the idea something I'd be able to build and scale alone to a place of profitability so I could hire a second person? And some day a third? If I wanted to take growth funding, when would I need it, and what would I have to give up to do so?

This document will likely be a living document as my ideas on this change and shift, so check the commit history to watch me rewrite my own history and cover up my tracks when I eventually need to take VC funding.